Theater - The Persian Quarter by Salt Lake Acting Company

Feb. 2 – Feb. 27, 2011

SLAC proudly presents the World Premiere of The Persian Quarter by Kathleen Cahill.

A diplomatic crisis and a chance encounter trigger revelations of a shared past. The play unfolds on the final day of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980 Tehran with Anne, an American hostage and Shirin, an Iranian revolutionary student who is one of her captors.

Thirty years later in New York City, their daughters, Emily and Azadeh, meet accidentally in an empty classroom at Columbia University during the visit of Iranian President Ahmadinejad.

From KATHLEEN CAHILL (Playwright)What was I doing writing this play? You stand at the mirror and look at yourself, and you can assess yourself, and you can assess your appearance, but you can’t see what’s inside – you can’t see what’s inside yourself.

This play is actually trying to look inside myself. To look at an experience that I had 35 years ago. When I was 22, I went overland to Iran for adventure and to teach English. I didn’t know anything about Iran. Nothing. Zero. I didn’t even know how to count to ten in their language.

I remember I was taking the train from Istanbul to Iran, and there were Muslims on the train who unrolled their carpets five times a day and prayed to Mecca; I had never seen that before – I had never even heard of Mecca. One of them taught me to count to ten in Farsi, which I still remember. So I arrived in Tehran, and then I took an airplane to Shiraz and a taxi from the airport, and I cannot tell you – it was like arriving on another planet.

It’s a different year because they count the calendar from Mohammed not from Jesus, so it’s seven hundred years earlier; the days of the week are different – the Holy day isn’t Sunday, it’s Friday – Jomai – so it’s a six day week with Friday off, so those two things, just to begin with, threw me. Then I was wearing this little light Sunday dress with a little short skirt, and there were these tribal women around where the taxi dropped me off, and they started doing that yuyulating thing with their voices – because of my skirt. So it was all quite astonishing, and that was my introduction to Iran.

I lived there for ten months, and a lot of things happened, and I saw a lot of things, but I didn’t understand what I was seeing because I was uninformed and naïve. But I never forgot the experience, and when the elections came up in the news in 2009, and I saw the women in the streets protesting, I just thought, “What is this about, and what happened to me then, and how do those things connect over 35 years?”

So I started to think about it, and I started to read a lot, and it was amazing because a lot of memories – and I know this is true of every other person – you think you have forgotten, but if you start thinking back, it will come. More and more memories come. The language came back – I remembered sentences – like I remembered how to say, “So and so is amusing us.” (Laughter) Memories, memories, memories started to come back, and I tied those memories to what I was learning from my reading. I was also understanding things for the first time that I did not understand thirty-five years ago, and out of that came THE PERSIAN QUARTER. Read More

SLAC is delighted to announce that Kathleen Cahill’s play THE PERSIAN QUARTER is a recipient of a prestigious Edgerton Foundation New American Plays Award.